Submission to BRO by Greg C:
After reading the BRO post about Race and Ethnicity, it encouraged me to finish a project of my own. I marked every unimproved property owned by the City of Buffalo using Google Earth. As someone who spent a large amount of his childhood between the suburbs and the city, I’ve heard my fair share of horror stories of urban decay. One day, I just decided to take a list of addresses and put them on a map. The map represents the over six thousand properties offered by the city for purchasing (see PDF).
Mapping these properties tells a story of urban decay. It’s showing our scars. It shows what people abandoned decades ago. Almost entire blocks are for sale. And in some small cases, entire streets can be purchased. I’m not going to talk about the reasons why all of this happened. That too often is discussed on BRO.
I just recommend to look at the East Side. Check out Humboldt Parkway. Look at the vacant homes right near the Central Terminal. Notice the amount of homes for sale in between Genesee Street and Broadway. Why do we need the Kensington Expressway today (or pipedream boulevard proposal in the future) when there are little to no people living on or near the major roads of the East Side? Has it served its purpose?
I figure a map like this would be a starting point to a better and more specific conversation of revitalizing neighborhoods. I encourage people to come up with other ideas for map overlays, so we can all better understand the trends. I did think of adding a crime map, but Spotcrime.com’s mapplet didn’t work for some reason. I also tried to find a traffic map for specific times of day, but I couldn’t find one.